You can now stream live events with Microsoft Stream

A few weeks ago at Microsoft Inspire, we announced that Microsoft Stream will power the live events in Microsoft 365, and now the preview is here! Today, you can get started creating live events using Microsoft Stream for your organization. Schedule, produce and deliver live events more effectively for a variety of scenarios like companywide events, leadership updates and more, to connect with your internal audience in a more personable way.

You can schedule, produce and deliver live events using a single bitrate RTMP or RTMPS stream from an encoder – we’ll take care of all the transcoding for adaptive bitrate delivery so your viewers have a seamless streaming experience. And just like any other video in Microsoft Stream, you can make the live event open to your entire company or limit the access to specific groups or people.

Integrated live events across Microsoft 365

Seamless integration across Office 365 means that you can use Microsoft Stream to deliver highly produced, studio-quality events. In addition to creating and delivering live events in Microsoft Stream, you can also use Microsoft Teams, or Yammer wherever your audience, team, or community resides. Attendees can participate in real time, with high-definition video and interactive discussion, or catch up later with powerful AI features that unlock the content of the event recording.

Granting access to create a live event

By default, only a Microsoft Stream administrator can create a live event. Administrators can grant or restrict access for other people within an organization to also be able to create live events. In the Microsoft Stream administrator settings, administrators can explicitly add users or security groups that you want to give permissions to be able to create live events, or simply switch the toggle to off to allow everyone in your organization to be able to create live events. This control is only for the creation/production of a live event; everyone who has been granted view permissions to an event will be able to see it, regardless of this setting.

The ability to create a live event is dependent on admins granting access and having a Microsoft Stream or Office 365 license that allows for this capability. Learn more about live events administration.

Creating your first live event

Once you have been granted access from your administrator to create a live event, select Live event option from the create menu.

Fill in the event details, permissions and options, then save the event. Publish your event when you are ready to share with audience members.

When you are ready to go live, select the Start setup button on the producer page. This will prepare the setup to allow you to then send from the encoder. Once this is ready, select the encoder from the drop down list, or copy the RTMP server ingest URL into the encoder of your choice and start the feed to Microsoft Stream. Don’t worry, audience members will only see a slate until you start your event, this just gives you an opportunity to prepare your event.

Once you are satisfied with your setup, select Start event and audience members will start to see the feed coming through.

During the feed, you can monitor the number of viewers watching the event and the number of likes coming in.

When you are done with your event, select End event. At this point, the video will immediately be available for on demand consumption by your audience members. The event video will also be processed for automatic caption and transcript generation as well as people detection if these options were selected.

Easy encoder setup

Large scale live events with multiple cameras, microphones, and content sources use encoders to bring all of them together into one stream. Microsoft Stream supports in-product integration with 3rd party encoders such as Haivision KB and Makito encoders, Switcher Studio, Wirecast and Wirecast S, to enable quick and easy setup for live events. Check out the blog to learn more.

Scaling video delivery across the network

For organizations that want to reduce internet traffic and optimize network bandwidth for live events and popular videos, Microsoft Stream can be enabled to integrate with video delivery providers offering SDN/eCDN solutions. Our partners, Hive, Kollective, and Ramp, can help deliver a more scalable and efficient video distribution across your enterprise network. Check out the blog to learn more.

Feedback

As always with Microsoft Stream, we want to hear what you think. Let us know how you are liking the new live event feature through our Microsoft Stream community. Here you can share your feedback, ask questions or submit more ideas.